Tag: Jurgen Habermas

Understanding Social Actions

The concluding section of the introduction to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action is again very rich with insights. Several different notions of what rationality is are in play.

“With a formal world-concept an actor becomes involved in suppositions of commonality that, from his perspective, point beyond the circle of those immediately involved and claim to be valid for outside observers as well. This connection can easily be made clear in the case of teleological [sic] action. The concept of the objective world — in which the actor can intervene in a goal-directed manner — which is presupposed with this model of action must hold in the same way for the actor himself and for any other interpreter of his actions” (p. 102).

There is a kind of objectivity associated with utilitarian concerns.

“In the case of objectively purposive-rational action, the description of an action … has at the same time explanatory power in the sense of an explanation of intentions. To be sure, even if the objective purposive-rationality of an action is established, this does not at all mean that the agent must also have behaved subjectively in a purposive-rational manner; on the other hand, a subjectively purposive-rational action can of course prove to be less than optimal when judged objectively” (p. 103).

He recognizes a gap between “subjective” and “objective” views of utility.

“In advancing what Weber calls a rational interpretation, the interpreter himself takes a position on the claim with which purposive-rational actions appear; he relinquishes the attitude of a third person for the performative attitude of a participant who is examining a problematic validity claim and, if need be, criticizing it” (ibid).

Like Brandom, Habermas argues for the constitutive priority of the second person, and of I-Thou relationships.

“An actor’s behavior is subjectively ‘right’ (in the sense of normative rightness) if he sincerely believes himself to be following an existing norm of action; his behavior is objectively right if the norm in question is in fact regarded as justified among those to whom it applies…. [But the actor] challenges the interpreter to examine not only the actual norm-conformity of his action, or the de facto currency of the norm in question, but the rightness of this norm itself” (p. 104, emphasis added).

Unlike Brandom, who is wary of “regulism”, Habermas seems to identify norms with precisely identifiable rules and instituted law. This does not prevent him from saying many similar things about how normativity works. In particular, they both uphold a Kantian notion of normativity as independent of causal explanation. They both uphold an essentially intersubjective view of normativity. Brandom acknowledges Habermas as a significant influence.

“If the interpreter adopts … a skeptical standpoint, he will explain, with the help of a noncognitive variety of ethics, that the actor is deceiving himself in regard to the possibility of justifying norms, and that instead of reasons he could at best adduce empirical motives for the recognition of norms. Whoever argues in this way has to regard the concept of normatively regulated action as theoretically unsuitable; he will try to replace a description initially drawn in concepts of normatively regulated action with another one given, for example, in causal-behavioristic terms. On the other hand, if the interpreter is convinced of the theoretical fruitfulness of the normative model of action, he has to get involved in the suppositions of commonality that are accepted … and allow the possibility of testing the worthiness to be recognized of a norm held by an actor to be right ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Normativity is not to be reduced to anything else. The rightness of norms can always be questioned.

“A similar consequence follows from the dramaturgical model of action…. Again, the formal world-concept provides a basis for judgment that is shared by the agent and his interpreter…. The interpreter can, furthermore, uncover the systematically distorted character of processes of understanding by showing how the participants express themselves in a subjectively truthful manner and yet objectively say something other than what they (also) mean (unbeknownst to themselves)” (p. 105).

Habermas carefully distinguishes sincerity from objective truthfulness. It is possible to be sincere and wrong.

“The procedures of rational interpretation enjoy a questionable status in the social sciences…. In my view these objections are themselves based on empiricist assumptions that are open to question” (ibid).

He defends and builds on Max Weber’s interpretive Verstehen method for the social sciences.

“In communicative action, the very outcome of interaction is even made to depend on whether the participants can come to an agreement among themselves on an intersubjectively valid appraisal of their relations to the world…. Unlike those immediately involved, the interpreter is not striving for an interpretation on which there can be a consensus…. But perhaps the interpretive accomplishments of observer and participant differ only in their functions and not in their structure” (p. 106, emphasis in original).

Validity in communicative action is always intersubjective or shareable.

“Sociology must seek a verstehenden, or interpretive, access to its object domain, because it already finds there processes of reaching understanding through which and in which the object domain is antecedently constituted (that is, before any theoretical grasp of it)” (p. 107).

Underlying explicitly theoretical interpretation is a kind of pre-theoretical interpretation, in which we are always already engaged. Interpretation of one sort or another plays a constitutive role in every activity that is distinctively human. Human uptake of culture is in large measure a preconscious uptake of shared interpretive principles.

“The object domain of the social sciences encompasses everything that falls under the description ‘element of a lifeworld’. What this expression means can be clarified intuitively by reference to those symbolic objects that we produce in speaking and acting, beginning with immediate expressions (such as speech acts, purposive activities, and cooperative actions, through the sedimentations of these expressions (such as texts, traditions, documents, works of art, theories, objects of material culture, goods, techniques, and so on, to the indirectly generated configurations that are self-stabilizing and susceptible of organization (such as institutions, social systems, and personality structures)” (p. 108).

The core of a lifeworld can be understood as a set of interpretive principles, an ethos.

“The problem of Verstehen is of methodological importance in the humanities and social sciences primarily because the scientist cannot gain access to a symbolically prestructured reality through observation alone, and because understanding meaning [Sinnsverstehen] cannot be methodically brought under control in the same way as can observation in the course of experimentation. The social scientist basically has no other access to the lifeworld than the social-scientific layman does…. As we shall see, this circumstance prohibits the interpreter from separating questions of meaning and questions of validity” (ibid).

Scientists are people too. All recognition of validity and invalidity depends upon shareable interpretive principles. For Habermas, meaning is inseparable from justification.

“Historicism (Dilthey, Misch) and Neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert) constructed a dualism for the natural and human sciences at the level of the contrast between explanation and understanding. This ‘first round’ of the explanation/understanding controversy is no longer alive today. With the reception of phenomenological, language-analytic, and hermeneutic approaches in sociology, however, a discussion has arisen in connection with Husserl and Schutz, Wittgenstein and Winch, and Heidegger and Gadamer” (ibid).

“Opposed to this case, the empiricist theory of science has defended the concept of the unity of scientific method that was already developed in the Neo-Positivism of Vienna. This discussion can be regarded as over. The critics … misunderstood Verstehen as empathy, as a mysterious act of transposing oneself into the mental states of another subject” (p. 109).

“The next phase of the discussion was introduced with the post-empiricist turn of the analytic theory of science…. In [Mary Hesse’s] view, the debate concerning the history of modern physics that was touched off by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend has shown: first, that the data against which theories are tested cannot be described independently of the theory language in question; and second, that theories are constructed not according to the principles of falsificationism but in dependence on paradigms that … relate to one another in a manner similar to particular forms of life…. Hesse infers from this that theory formation in the natural sciences is no less dependent on interpretations than it is in the social sciences” (ibid).

“Giddens speaks of a ‘double’ hermeneutic because in the social sciences problems of interpretive understanding come into play not only through the theory-dependency of data description and the paradigm-dependency of theory languages; there is already a problem of understanding below the threshold of theory construction, namely in obtaining the data and not first in theoretically describing them” (p. 110).

“This is, of course, not a new insight; it is precisely the thesis that the critics of the unity of scientific method had always put forward. It has merely been placed in a new light because the analytic theory of science has, with its recent postempiricist turn, rediscovered in its own way the critical insight that was held up to it by the Verstehen theorists (and that was to be found in any case along the path of the pragmatist logic of science from Pierce to Dewey)” (pp. 110-111).

This is significant. Habermas joins Weber’s Verstehen method for social science with an explicitly pragmatist view of how science works, opposing both to empiricism.

“One who, in the role of a third person, observes something in the world or makes a statement about something in the world adopts an objectivating attitude. By contrast, one who takes part in a communication and, in the role of the first person (ego), enters into an intersubjective relation with a second person (who, as the alter ego, behaves to ego in turn as to a second person) adopts a non-objectivating, or as we would now say, a performative attitude” (p. 111).

Like Brandom, Habermas emphasizes a constitutive role for second-person forms over the first and third person. Again we see the importance of dialogue. Although by their respective avowals Brandom has a much more positive view of Hegel, they both adopt a Hegel-like critique of objectification and a Kantian/Hegelian critique of the supposed givenness of objects.

“Meanings — whether embodied in actions, institutions, products of labor, words, networks of cooperation — can be made accessible only from the inside…. The lifeworld is open only to subjects who make use of their competence to speak and act” (p. 112).

Meanings are immanently constituted, but the field of their immanence is the world or a shareable lifeworld, not someone’s private consciousness. There is no meaning without interpretation. Interpretation does not just play a supporting role in what Habermas calls communicative action, but is fundamental to it. Conversely, interpretation in its first instance is communicative. Monologue and private thought are derivative; dialogue is primary.

“Skjervheim draws our attention here to the interesting fact that the performative attitude of a first person in relation to a second means at the same time an orientation to validity claims” (p. 113).

The notion of performativity in language was introduced in Austin’s work on speech acts, for kinds of action that find their consummation in language. A performative attitude is involved in a promise or commitment. It is a social act. These are kinds of more full-blooded doing in language that are distinct from mere representation or logical assertion.

“Thus the interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content of an expression independently of the action contexts in which participants react to the expression in question with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or an abstention. And he does not understand these yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the implicit reasons to take the positions they do. For agreement and disagreement, insofar as they are judged in light of reciprocally raised validity claims and not merely caused by external factors, are based on reasons that participants supposedly or actually have at their disposal” (p. 115).

The “content” of meaning or assertion depends essentially and not just accidentally on the context in which it is embedded. This context has the shape of reasons and a space of reasons, though I haven’t yet seen Habermas use the latter term.

“These (most often implicit) reasons form the axis around which processes of reaching understanding evolve. But if, in order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which a speaker would if necessary and under suitable conditions defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a third person, that is, without reactions of affirmation or negation or abstention. The interpreter would not have understood what a ‘reason’ is if he did not reconstruct it with its claim to provide grounds” (pp. 115-116, emphasis in original).

There could be no “value-free science” of meaning. Interpretation is not separable from evaluation.

“One can understand reasons only to the extent that one understands why they are or are not sound…. An interpreter cannot, therefore, interpret expressions connected through criticizable validity claims … without taking a position on them” (p. 116, emphasis in original).

Evaluation is a matter of reasons and the goodness of reasons.

“We thereby expose our interpretation in principle to the same critique to which communicative agents must mutually expose their interpretations. But this means that the distinction between descriptive and rational interpretations becomes meaningless at this level…. Or better: that interpretation that is rational in conception is here the only way to gain access to the de facto course of communicative action ” (p. 119).

For Habermas, the social scientist and the philosopher in doing their characteristic work of interpretation themselves engage essentially in communicative action that is not fundamentally different in kind from the communicative action that the social scientist is concerned to study.

In sociology, ethnomethodology is concerned with the social construction of lifeworlds. It is commonly associated with the claim of a so-called social construction of “reality”, for which the canonical source is Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966). These nonphilosophers deny that there is any objective reality, and so fall into a relativistic subjectivism. Habermas, with his very serious concern for the justification of validity claims, strongly rejects this.

“In ethnomethodology and philosophical hermeneutics this insight has been revived and is upsetting the conventional self-understanding of sociology determined by the postulate of value-freedom…. [T]he social scientist … is moving within the same structures of possible understanding in which those immediately involved carry out their communicative actions…. These same structures also simultaneously provide the critical means to penetrate a context, to burst it open from within and to transcend it; the means, if need be, to push beyond a de facto established consensus, to revise errors, correct misunderstandings, and the like” (p. 120).

Here he explicitly rejects the empiricist notion of “value-free science”. At the same time, he stresses the liberating potential of the study of communicative action.

“Schutz makes a remark in passing that suggests the starting point for a solution: ‘Verstehen is by no means a private affair'” (p. 123).

He again cites the socially oriented phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. Schutz too agrees that Weber’s Verstehen is an essentially social kind of interpretation that is irreducible to any individual consciousness. Human subjectivity has its ground in intersubjectivity and shareable meaning, rather than in individual egos. This is not to say there is no ego, but that ego is a derivative result and not a principle.

“In everyday communication an utterance never stands alone; a semantic content accrues to it from the context the speaker presupposes that the hearer understands. The interpreter too must penetrate that context of reference as a participating partner in interaction. The exploratory moment oriented to knowledge cannot be detached from the creative, constructive moment oriented to producing consensus” (p. 125).

“The social scientist also has no privileged access to the object domain…. Ethnomethodological critique … attempts to demonstrate that the usual constructions of social science have at bottom the same status as the everyday constructions of lay members. They remain bound to the social context they are supposed to explain because they fall prey to the objectivism of ordinary consciousness” (ibid).

This “objectivism of ordinary consciousness” has the characteristics of what Kant calls dogmatism. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning; it is never self-contained.

“Theoretical work is, like religion or art, an activity distinguished by reflexivity; the fact that it makes an explicit theme of the interpretive processes on which the researcher draws does not dissolve its situational ties” (p. 126).

Even interpretation with the greatest explicitness, objectivity, and universality remains tied in principle to some limiting context of interpretation. Definiteness implies limitation.

“Garfinkel [in his work on ethnomethodology] wants to carry out the phenomenological program of grasping the general structures of lifeworlds as such by searching out in the interpretive activities of everyday routine action the practices through which individuals renew the objective appearance of social order” (p. 127).

“Garfinkel treats as mere phenomena the validity claims, on whose intersubjective recognition every communicatively achieved agreement does indeed rest — however occasional, feeble, and fragmentary consensus formation may be. He does not distinguish between a valid consensus for which participants could if necessary provide reasons, and an agreement without validity — that is, one that is established de facto on the basis of the threat of sanctions, rhetorical onslaught, calculation, desperation, or resignation…. The ethnomethodologically enlightened sociologist regards validity claims that point beyond local, temporal, and cultural boundaries as something that participants merely take to be universal” (pp. 128-129).

Habermas rejects Garfinkel’s conclusion that no genuinely objective reality emerges from social construction.

“But if Garfinkel is serious about this recommendation, he has to reserve for the ethnomethodologist the privileged position of a ‘disinterested’ observer” (p. 129).

“In thematizing what participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (p. 130, emphasis in original).

This openness to all participants is very important.

“The ethnomethodologist is interested in the interactive competence of adult speakers because he wants to investigate how actions are coordinated through cooperative processes of interpretation. He is concerned with interpretation as an ongoing accomplishment of participants in interaction, that is, with the microprocesses of interpreting situations and securing consensus, which are highly complex even when the participants can effortlessly begin with a customary interpretation of the situation in a stable context of action; under the microscope every understanding proves to be occasional and fragile” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics … is concerned with interpretation as an exceptional accomplishment, which becomes necessary only when relevant segments of the lifeworld become problematic, when the certainties of a culturally stable background break down and the normal means of reaching understanding fail; under the ‘macroscope’ understanding appears to be endangered only in the extreme cases of penetrating a foreign language, an unfamiliar culture, a distant epoch or, all the more so, pathologically deformed areas of life” (pp. 130-131).

When Habermas speaks of hermeneutics, he primarily has the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in mind. Gadamer is another figure I need to write about in the future.

“The paradigm case for hermeneutics is the interpretation of a traditional text. The interpreter appears at first to understand the sentences of the author; in going on, he has the unsettling experience that he does not really understand the text so well that he could, if need be, respond to the questions of the author. The interpreter takes this to be a sign that he is wrongly embedding in the text a context other than the author himself did, that he is starting with other questions” (p. 131).

“The interpreter … seeks to understand why the author — in the belief that certain states of affairs obtain, that certain values and norms are valid, that certain experiences can be attributed to certain subjects…. Only to the extent that the interpreter grasps the reasons that allow the author’s utterances to be considered rational does he understand what the author could have meant…. The interpreter cannot understand the semantic content of a text if he is not in a position to present to himself the reasons that the author might have been able to adduce in defense of his utterances under suitable conditions. And because it is not the same thing for reasons to be sound as for them to be taken to be sound … the interpreter absolutely cannot present reasons to himself without judging them, without taking a positive or negative position on them” (pp. 131-132).

“If the interpreter would not so much as pose questions of validity, one might rightfully ask him whether he is interpreting at all” (p. 133).

“We credit all subjects with rationality who are oriented to reaching understanding and thereby to universal validity claims, who base their interpretive accomplishments on an intersubjectively valid reference system of worlds, let us say, on a decentered understanding of the world” (p. 134).

“Gadamer endangers his fundamental hermeneutic insight because hidden behind his preferred model of philological concern with canonical texts lies the really problematic case of the dogmatic interpretation of sacred scriptures” (p. 135).

“Our discussion of the basic concepts of action theory and of the methodology of Verstehen have shown that the rationality problematic does not come to sociology from the outside but breaks out within it…. If this rationality problematic cannot be avoided in the basic concepts of social action and of understanding meaning, how do things stand with respect to the substantial question of whether, and if so how, modernization processes can be viewed from the standpoint of rationalization?” (p. 136).

“If the understanding of meaning has to be understood as communicative experience, and if this is possible only on the performative attitude of a communicative actor, the experiential basis of an interpretive [sinnsverstehenden] sociology is compatible with its claim to objectivity only if hermeneutic procedures can be based at least intuitively on general and encompassing structures of rationality. From both points of view, the metatheoretical and the methodological, we cannot expect objectivity in social-theoretical knowledge if the corresponding concepts of communicative action and interpretation express a merely particular perspective on rationality, one interwoven with a particular cultural tradition” (p. 137).

Habermas wants to deeply investigate particulars, without falling into particularism.

“We have, by way of anticipation, characterized the rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding in terms of (a) the three world-relations of actors and the corresponding concepts of the objective, social, and subjective worlds; (b) the validity claims of propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity or authenticity; (c) the concept of a rationally motivated agreement, that is, one based on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims; and (d) the concept of reaching understanding as the cooperative negotiation of common definitions of the situation. If the requirement of objectivity is to be satisfied, this structure would have to be shown to be universally valid in a specific sense. This is a very strong requirement for someone who is operating without metaphysical support and is also no longer confident that a rigorous transcendental-pragmatic program, claiming to provide ultimate grounds, can be carried out” (ibid).

He is very honest about the challenge of making his case for an emergence of objectivity out of interpretation and dialogue.

“It is, of course, obvious that the type of action oriented to reaching understanding, whose rational internal structure we sketched above in very rough outline, is by no means everywhere and always encountered as the normal case in everyday practice…. In claiming universal validity — with, however, many qualifications — for our concept of rationality, without thereby adhering to a completely untenable belief in progress, we are taking on a sizable burden of proof. Its weight becomes completely clear when we pass from sharp and oversimplified contrasts supporting a superiority of modern thought to the less glaring oppositions disclosed by intercultural comparison of the modes of thought of the various religions and world civilizations” (p. 138).

He calls a belief in progress in history “completely untenable”. This is a sharp difference from Brandom. On the other hand, he also rejects the pessimism of Adorno. I seek to develop a middle road in this regard, which is one of the reasons for my interest in Habermas.

“I shall take up conceptual strategies, assumptions, and lines of argument from Weber to Parsons with the systematic aim of laying out the problems that can be solved by means of a theory of rationalization developed in terms of the basic concept of communicative action. What can lead us to this goal is not a history of ideas but a history of theory with systematic intent…. Thus for any social theory, linking up with the history of theory is also a kind of test; the more freely it can take up, explain, criticize, and carry on the intentions of earlier theory traditions, the more impervious it is to the danger that particular interests are being brought to bear unnoticed in its own theoretical perspective” (pp. 139-140).

This is another point I would strongly endorse. I like Hegel’s view that philosophy is inseparable from its history, as Habermas says about theory.

“I shall take the following path: Max Weber’s theory of rationalization extends, on the one side, to the structural changes in religious worldviews and the cognitive potential of the differentiated value spheres of science, morality, and art, and, on the other side, to the selective pattern of capitalist rationalization…. The aporetic course of the [“Western”] Marxist reception of Weber’s rationalization thesis from Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adorno shows the limits of approaches based on a theory of consciousness and the reasons for a change of paradigm from purposive activity to communicative action…. In this light, Mead’s foundation of the social sciences in a theory of communication and Durkheim’s sociology of religion fit together in such a way that the concept of interaction mediated by language and regulated by norms can be given an explanation in the sense of a conceptual genesis. The idea of the linguistification of the sacred … provides a perspective from which Mead’s and Durkheim’s assumptions regarding the rationalization of the lifeworld converge” (pp. 140-141).

This is a fascinating project, with much relevance to the work I’ve been pursuing here. I’m still curious for more detail on what he sees in the philosophically oriented social science of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead.

Uncurtailed Communication

Habermas has said that reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech. While deeply involved in the theory of empirical social science, he wants to look at language beyond its status as an empirical phenomenon, to the expansive ethical possibilities of “uncurtailed communication”. This is closely bound up with his idea of communicative action as representing the kind of ideal speech situation that I have summarized as “dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition“. Uncurtailed communication would be a full-blooded realization of the Enlightenment values of freedom and equality. At the same time, it gives freedom and equality a more specific reference, by developing intersubjectivity at the micro level of concrete interactions between people.

“Even the strategic model of action can be understood in such a way that the participants’ actions, directed through egocentric calculations of utility and coordinated through interest situations, are mediated through speech acts. In the cases of normatively regulated and dramaturgical action we even have to suppose a consensus formation among participants that is in principle of a linguistic nature. Nevertheless, in these three models of action language is conceived one-sidedly in different respects” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 94).

Again we should note that he is using the terms “normative” and “teleological” in different senses than I have been developing here. This homonymy need not be an issue, provided that we keep each meaning distinct.

“The teleological [sic] model of action takes language as one of several media through which speakers oriented to their own success can influence one another in order to bring opponents to form or to grasp beliefs and intentions that are in the speakers’ own interest. This concept of language — developed from the limit case of indirect communication aimed at getting someone to form a belief, an intention, or the like — is, for instance, basic to intentionalist semantics. The normative model of action presupposes language as a medium that transmits cultural values and carries a consensus that is merely reproduced with each additional act of understanding. This culturalist concept of language is widespread in cultural anthropology and content-oriented linguistics. The dramaturgical model of action presupposes language as a medium of self-presentation; the cognitive significance of the propositional components are thereby played down in favor of the expressive functions of speech acts. Language is assimilated to stylistic and aesthetic forms of expression” (p. 95, emphasis in original).

The “teleological” and “normative” models that he criticizes both treat language and values as inert, while the dramaturgical one focuses on immediate presentation. The notion of intentionality that Habermas uses here is not the very innovative one that Brandom attributes to Kant, but a more standard, empiricist one.

He clarifies what he means by “formal pragmatics”, linking it to the notion of uncurtailed communication. This quality of being uncurtailed relates not only to a micro-level realization of freedom and equality, but also to the addressing of all three of Popper’s “worlds”.

“Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation. This interpretive concept of language lies behind the various efforts to develop a formal pragmatics” (p. 95, emphasis in original).

I really like this point about “uncurtailed” communication. It has important consequences for personal life too.

“The one-sidedness of the first three concepts of language can be seen in the fact that the corresponding types of communication singled out by them prove to be limit cases of communicative action…. In each case only one function of language is thematized: the release of perlocutionary effects, the establishment of interpersonal relations, and the expression of subjective experiences. By contrast, the communicative model of action, which defines the traditions of social science connected with Mead’s symbolic interactionism, Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, Austin’s theory of speech acts, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, takes all the functions of language equally into consideration” (ibid).

“In order to avoid mislocating the concept of communicative action from the start, I would like to characterize the level of complexity of speech acts that simultaneously express a propositional content, the offer of an interpersonal relationship, and the intention of the speaker” (p. 96, emphasis added).

Habermas wants to define or discover communicative action as involving all three of Popper’s worlds. The mislocation he speaks of reminds me of some silly debates about whether Aristotle’s Categories is about language or about the world, as if these were two mutually exclusive possibilities, when there is clear textual evidence that Aristotle aims at both.

“In the course of the analysis it will become evident how much this concept owes to investigations in the philosophy of language stemming from Wittgenstein. Precisely for this reason it might be well to point out that the concept of following a rule with which analytic philosophy begins does not go far enough. If one grasps linguistic conventions only from the perspective of rule following, and explains them by means of a concept of intentions based on rule consciousness, one loses that aspect of the threefold relation to the world of communicative agents that is important for me” (ibid).

This is an important qualification to keep in mind. Habermas elsewhere stresses a Kantian emphasis on rules, which is intended to avoid particularism. Here he effectively recognizes that rules are not a sufficient basis for meta-ethical interpretation.

(Earlier, I had expected to move quickly to his discussions of discourse ethics, but I must confess that so far, I find those to be rather narrowly technical. There seems to be richer “ethical” content here in his main work that inspires me to write than in those discussions. But my personal view is that broad meta-ethical inquiry is the actual heart of ethics, and is what ought to constitute first philosophy. I relate this to Brandom’s thesis that meta-ethics is properly “normative all the way down”, and need never reduce ethical conclusions to non-normative ones. I recall also Aristotle’s advice (Nicomachean Ethics book 1) not to seek greater precision in an inquiry than is appropriate to the subject matter.)

“I shall use the term ‘action’ only for those symbolic expressions with which the actor takes up a relation to at least one world. I shall distinguish from actions the bodily movements and operations that are concurrently executed…. In a certain sense, actions are realized through movements of the body, but only in such a way that the actor, in following a technical or social rule, concomitantly executes these movements. Concomitant execution means that the actor intends an action but not the bodily movements with the help of which he realizes it. A bodily movement is an element of an action but not an action” (pp. 96-97, emphasis in original).

Action is not reducible to motion. It involves “relating to a world”. I would also put a caveat on language like “the actor intends”, which reflects neither an innovative account of Aristotelian act like Aubry’s, nor an innovative account of Kantian intentionality like Brandom’s. Habermas rejects what he calls the philosophy of consciousness, but seems to retain a relatively conventional notion of an acting subject.

“Operational rules do not have explanatory power; following them does not mean, as does following rules of action, that the actor is relating to something in the world and is thereby oriented to validity claims connected with action-motivated reasons” (p. 98).

This seems to be a development of Kant’s distinction between being governed by rules and being governed by concepts of rules, which he associates exclusively with free rational beings.

“This should make clear why we cannot analyze communicative utterances in the same way as we do the grammatical sentences with the help of which we carry them out. For the communicative model of action, language is relevant only from the pragmatic viewpoint that speakers, in employing sentences with an orientation to reaching understanding, take up relations to the world, not only directly as in teleological [sic], normatively regulated, or dramaturgical action, but in a reflective way. Speakers integrate the three formal world-concepts, which appear in the other modes of action either singly or in pairs, into a system…. They no longer relate straightaway to something in the objective, social, or subjective worlds; instead they relativize their utterances against the possibility that their validity will be contested by other actors…. A speaker puts forward a criticizable claim in relating with his utterance to at least one ‘world’; he thereby uses the fact that this relation between actor and world is in principle open to objective appraisal in order to call upon his opposite number to take a rationally motivated position” (pp. 98-99, emphasis in original).

Taking up relations to the world in a reflective way is what we’re about here.

“Thus the speaker claims truth for statements or existential presuppositions, rightness for legitimately regulated actions and their normative context, and truthfulness or sincerity for the manifestation of subjective experiences. We can easily recognize therein the three relations of actor to world presupposed by the social scientist in the previously analyzed concepts of action; but in the context of communicative action they are ascribed to the perspective of the speakers and hearers themselves. It is the actors themselves who seek consensus and measure it against truth, rightness, and sincerity, that is, against the ‘fit’ or ‘misfit’ between the speech act, on the one hand, and the three worlds to which the actor takes up relations with his utterance, on the other (pp. 99-100).

This way of formulating the matter seems like it would also be applicable to interpersonal relations, independent of its relevance to social science.

“For both parties the interpretive task consists in incorporating the other’s interpretation of the situation into one’s own in such a way that in the revised version ‘his’ external world and ‘my’ external world can — against the background of ‘our’ lifeworld — be relativized in relation to ‘the’ world, and the divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently. Naturally this does not mean that interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously differentiated assignment. Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative picture of everyday life” (p. 100).

Life with others is a negotiation of shared interpretation. The process can also fail.

Habermas on Intersubjectivity

“The formal-pragmatic approach to meaning theory begins with the question of what it means to understand an utterance — that is, a sentence employed communicatively. Formal semantics makes a conceptual cut between the meaning [Bedeutung] of a sentence and the meaning [Meinung] of the speaker, who, when he uses the sentence in a speech act, can say something other than it literally means” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 297).

His use of the adjective “formal” seems chosen to contrast with “empirical”. Pragmatics comes out looking better than semantics. Unlike Brandom, he does not also invent a new semantics to complement his new pragmatics.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable. From the standpoint of the speaker, the conditions of acceptability are identical to the conditions for his illocutionary success. Acceptability is not defined here in an objectivistic sense, from the perspective of an observer, but in the performative attitude of a participant in communication. A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are rather conditions for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (pp. 297-298, emphasis in original).

Brandom treats something very like this intersubjective acceptability as a normative judgment, and refers to a background requirement of mutual recognition.

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. And one who doubts the validity of the underlying norms has to give reasons…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds. To this extent, the conditions for the acceptability of directions can be found in the illocutionary meaning of the speech act itself; they do not need to be completed by additional conditions of sanction” (pp. 301-302).

Habermas is saying that validity is necessarily intersubjective. It could not be private.

“In general, no special obligations follow from the meaning of constative speech acts” (pp. 303-304).

“Not all illocutionary acts are constitutive for communicative action, but only those with which speakers connect criticizable validity claims” (p. 305).

“The fact that the intersubjective commonality of a communicatively achieved agreement exists at the levels of normative accord, shared propositional knowledge, and mutual trust in subjective sincerity can be explained in turn through the functions of achieving understanding in language” (p. 308).

“Semantic investigations of descriptive, expressive, and normative sentences, if only they are carried through consistently enough, force us to change the level of analysis. The very analysis of the conditions of the validity of sentences itself compels us to analyze the conditions for the intersubjective recognition of corresponding validity claims” (p. 316).

Here he does gesture in the direction of a more interesting semantics.

“It is part of understanding a sentence that we are capable of recognizing grounds through which the claim that its truth conditions are satisfied could be redeemed” (p. 317, emphasis in original).

This should be recognized as elementary. Understanding an assertion is not only concerned with vocabulary and grammar, but also with grounds and consequences.

“As with the meaning of assertoric sentences, it can also be shown for expressive and normative sentences that semantic analysis pushes beyond itself. The discussion that stems from Wittgenstein’s analysis of first-person sentences makes it clear that the claim connected with expressions is genuinely addressed to others. The intersubjective character of the validity of norms is even clearer” (p. 318).

Models of Action

My first significant issue with Habermas has to do with the reductive way in which he recurringly speaks about “teleological action” as, in effect, any old pursuit of an objective, and thus as to be understood in terms of modern instrumental reason. This puts the primary focus on immediate objectives, whereas for Aristotle, immediate objectives only minimally count as ends. The more proper ends for Aristotle are things sought “for themselves”, and not as part of any utilitarian calculation of means. Aristotelian teleology in its primary sense is not about the mere pursuit of objectives, but relates primarily to those ultimate values that are sought for themselves.

I think that in fact Habermas does not intend a serious reference to Aristotle here. This “Aristotle” resembles the same cardboard stereotype we see cited in discussions of early modern logic.

“Since Aristotle [sic], the concept of teleological action has been at the center of the philosophical theory of action. The actor attains an end or brings about the occurrence of a desired state by choosing means that have promise of being successful in the given situation and applying them in a suitable manner. The central concept is that of a decision among alternative courses of action, with a view to the realization of an end, guided by maxims, and based on an interpretation of the situation” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 85, emphasis in original).

(In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes on the contrary that choice is a consequence of deliberation, not an original or ultimately arbitrary decision. What Habermas says gives partial recognition to this. I call it partial because he still calls decision rather than deliberation the “central concept”, whereas Aristotle clearly gives more weight to the deliberation.)

“This model is often interpreted in utilitarian terms; the actor is supposed to choose and calculate means and ends from the standpoint of maximizing utility or expectations of utility. It is this model of action that lies behind decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches in economics, sociology, and social psychology” (ibid).

Clearly, this is very far removed from Aristotelian teleology. Habermas discusses “normative” and “dramaturgical” models of action along with this “teleological” kind that really corresponds to utilitarian calculation. The “normative” kind also has a rather reductive flavor. But all three of these models are really just stage-setting for a contrast with the communicative reason that Habermas wants to recommend, and treats as primary.

“For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (p. 275, emphasis added).

In general, an expansive rather than narrow approach to the meaning of what is shareably said is more valuable and more relevant than speculation about subjective motivations.

“The organon model of Karl Bühler is representative of this communication-theoretic line of inquiry…. This meaning-theoretic line of development of the organon model leads us away from the objectivistic conception of processes of reaching understanding as information flows between senders and receivers and in the direction of the formal-pragmatic concept of interaction among speaking and acting subjects, interaction that is mediated through acts of reaching understanding” (p. 276).

So far I’ve been keeping aside how this talk about action should be related to a more Aristotelian notion of act, like that developed by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Without a doubt “acts of reaching understanding” come closer to this than any of the other action models Habermas discusses.

Habermas notes that the leading mid-20th century logical empiricist Rudolph Carnap, who approached representational semantics at the less atomistic level of propositions taken as true, almost entirely ignored the pragmatics of language, treating it as basically irrational.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system…. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumptions of reference semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis. On this view, the pragmatics of language is not determined by a general system of rules in such a way that it could be opened up to conceptual analysis like syntax and semantics” (ibid).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummett gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements” (ibid).

As usual, I prefer to be very modest about claims to “science”. What Habermas calls a formal science, I would call interpretive work. In the German tradition, Wissenschaft has a broader sense than common English usage of “science”. Habermas has himself written elsewhere about the centrality of a notion of interpretation.

“Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity for truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This still presupposes that what knowledge is and what truth is are unproblematic. It really only replaces simplistic word-representationalism with a much richer sentence-representationalism. Sentence-representationalism is just as referential as word-representationalism, just more abstract. Habermas’s use of “true” here strikes me as referential in the same way. It just is not naively referential.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration. Frege had already distinguished between the assertoric or interrogative force of assertions or questions and the structure of the propositional sentences employed in these utterances. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin and Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces. The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time, … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics” (p. 277).

This account of speech acts seems like a nice, careful, balanced judgment.

“The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

He doesn’t quite say it, but I think the kind of pragmatics developed by Habermas and Brandom provides a much better account of what meaning really is than standard representational semantics.

“Bühler’s theory of language functions could be connected with the methods and insights of the analytic theory of meaning and be made the centerpiece of a theory of communicative action oriented to reaching understanding if we could generalize the concept of validity beyond the truth of propositions and identify validity conditions no longer only on the semantic level of sentences but on the pragmatic level of utterances” (ibid, emphasis added).

I suspect that in some places where Habermas speaks of validity claims, Brandom would invoke normativity or commitments instead. Habermas seems to work with a narrow notion of normativity that mainly characterizes law and Kantian deontology, but he partly makes up for it by giving what I would call a “normative” aspect to his broad notion of validity. I deemphasize any differences between “ethics”, “morality”, and “normativity”, but Habermas thinks it is important to distinguish them.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy that was introduced by J. L. Austin [speech act theory] … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function also has consequences…. It is not merely a question of admitting other modes of language use on an equal footing with the assertoric; we have to establish validity claims and world-relations for them as was done for the assertoric mode. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary role over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component that specifies which validity claims a speaker is raising in his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what…. The corresponding validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity can the serve as guiding threads (pp. 277-278).

In Christian theology, logos is primarily representational, but I contend that this is not at all true of logos in Plato and Aristotle, where it always has connotations of reason, reasoning, or discourse. On the other hand, Habermas does not believe in “substantive” reason. He argues for an exclusively procedural communicative reason, in which the procedural aspect has strong affinities with modern procedural notions of justice. For my part, I cleave to a Platonic emphasis on mixed forms, and would like to undo any sharp distinction between substantive and procedural reason.

(And at a sort of halfway point between pure representation and discursive reasoning, Euclid uses logos for what we know as ratio in mathematics. It is historically interesting that logos and ratio have closely related meanings in two senses — representational and inferential — and not just one. Euclid’s theory of ratio and proportion is a historically important paradigm for exact reasoning that is effectively independent of Plato and Aristotle, though later. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, reason in Euclid is more formal and much less discursive. Hobbes and other early moderns looked to Euclid as a model.)

In Austin’s terminology, “locution” is what is said and meant, “illocution” is what is done in a speech act, and “perlocution” is what happens as a result. Like Brandom, Habermas treats saying as a kind of doing, and therefore stresses the illocutionary aspect. Habermas has just reminded us that empiricism treats illocution only as an irrational force, and not as something that could be rationally understood. This applies as well to the neo-Kantian sociology of Weber.

“Weber begins by introducing ‘meaning’ as a basic concept of action theory and with its help distinguishes actions from observable behavior…. Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation. At this first switchpoint Weber parts company with a theory of communicative action. What counts as fundamental is not the interpersonal relation between at least two speaking and acting subjects — a relation that refers back to reaching understanding in language — but the purposive activity of a solitary acting subject” (p. 279).

Habermas is saying that even in Weber’s sociology, the neo-Kantian individual subject remains originally isolated, as in the “Cartesian” stereotype. It only acquires social significance after being individually constituted.

“Thus Weber starts from a teleological [sic] model of action, and specifies ‘subjective meaning’ as a (precommunicative) action intention…. Since Weber starts from a monologically conceived model of action, the concept of ‘social action’ cannot be introduced by way of explicating the concept of meaning…. On the other hand, … Weber stresses that the action orientations of participants have to be reciprocally related to one another” (p. 280).

But “Weber does not start from the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into a existing situation and the truth of the empirical assumptions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

“I shall speak of communicative action whenever the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding” (pp. 285-286).

“Processes of reaching understanding aim at an agreement that meets the conditions of rationally motivated assent [Zustimmung] to the content of an utterance. A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party…. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with each other. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Without doubt, there are countless cases [where] one subject inconspicuously harnesses another for his own purposes, that is, induces him to behave in a desired way by manipulatively employing linguistic means and thereby instrumentalizes him for his own success. Such examples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding” (p. 288).

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (ibid).

Communicative reason is primary for Habermas in a way much analogous to the way Brandom says we really have “normativity all the way down”. Brandom recalls the figure of speech “turtles all the way down”. This was supposed to be the answer of some primitive to the question that if the world is on the back of a great turtle, what does the turtle stand on? The answer was, supposedly, “It’s turtles all the way down”, which humorously undermines the status of the purportedly foundational world-turtle.

“The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends [sic] they want to realize . As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (p. 289, emphasis in original).

In a situation where the meaning of what is said is constitutive, we have something like what Aristotle called an entelechy. This is the purest form of Aristotelian teleology, applicable to the values that are sought purely for themselves and not for any egocentric reason. Habermas in effect wants to say that communicative reason is closely related to entelechy, though he would not use that term. I would go further, and relate it to the pure entelechy and contemplation that Aristotle associates with the first cause and with the goal of human life.

Popper’s Three Worlds

Habermas in the third chapter of Theory of Communicative Action quotes the noted philosopher of science Karl Popper’s 1967 address “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject”, which surprised the empiricist community by claiming that besides physical objects and states of consciousness there must also be “the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art” (vol. 1 p. 76, emphasis in original). I must confess that I have deprioritized Popper, due to his horrible but influential claim in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that Plato and Hegel sow the seeds of totalitarianism. But on the contents of thought, he is worth listening to.

According to Habermas, Popper takes up Frege and Husserl’s critique of psychologism.

“Popper is criticizing the fundamental empiricist conception of a subject that confronts the world in an immediate way…. This problem context explains why he understands his doctrine of objective mind as a critical extension of the empiricist concept and introduces both objective and subjective mind as ‘worlds’, that is, as special totalities of entities. The older theories of objective mind or spirit developed in the historicist and neo-Hegelian traditions from Dilthey… start from an active mind that expounds itself in the worlds it constitutes. By contrast, Popper holds fast to the primacy of the world in relation to mind…. The world counts as the totality of what is the case” (pp. 76-77).

The last part is a famous formulation from Wittgenstein.

What Habermas calls a historicist “active mind” seems to recall stereotypes of Hegel rather than anything in Aristotle. Habermas sides with Popper against bad Hegelianism. He does not seem to share Robert Pippin’s concern to insist on the purely active character of human understanding. I take this to be a good thing.

“Popper distinguishes between explicit semantic contents that are already embodied in phonemes and written signs, in color or stone, in machines, and so forth, on the one hand, and those implicit semantic contents that are not yet ‘discovered’, not yet objectified in carrier objects of the first world, but are simply inherent in already embodied meanings. Symbolic formations… confront subjective mind with the objectivity of a problematic, uncomprehended complex of meaning that can be opened up only through intellectual labor. The products of the human mind immediately turn against it as problems” (p. 77, emphasis in original).

I like the emphasis on problems. Meanings are never just there, or simply given. All meaning has a problematic aspect, when examined closely enough. All meaning is subject to interpretation. That is one reason why the cooperative social aspect of communication is so important.

“These problems are clearly autonomous. They are in no sense made by us; and in this sense they exist, undiscovered, before their discovery. Moreover, at least some of these problems may be insoluble” (ibid).

“[T]he moment we have produced … theories, they create new, unintended and unexpected problems, autonomous problems, problems to be discovered. This explains why the third world, which in its origin is our product, is autonomous in what may be called its ontological status. It explains why we can act upon it and add to it or help its growth, even though no one can master even a small corner of this world. All of us contribute to its growth, but almost all of our individual contributions are vanishingly small. All of us try to grasp it, and none of us could live without being in contact with it, for all of us make use of speech, without which we would hardly be human. Yet the third world has grown far beyond the grasp not only of any individual but even of all individuals (as shown by the existence of insoluble problems)” (p. 78).

Meaning also has or can have its own kind of objectivity, tied neither to physical things nor to an individual subject or community. Its objectivity and its problematic character need to be thought together.

“This entails a renunciation of two fundamental empiricist conceptions. On the one hand, the entities of the third world cannot be reduced — as forms of expression of subjective mind — to mental states, that is, to entities of the second world. On the other hand, the relations between entities of the first and second worlds cannot be conceived exclusively in terms of the causal model that holds for relations between entities of the first world themselves. Popper bars the way both to a psychologistic conception of objective mind and to a physicalistic conception of subjective mind. The autonomy of the third world guarantees instead that knowledge of, as well as intervention into, states of the objective world are mediated through discovery of the independence of internal meaning connections” (ibid, emphasis added).

Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning. It is made up of “internal connections”. Efficient causality is useful for getting things done, but is a poor fit for the understanding of human reality.

“The development of science, which Popper understands as a cumulative feedback process involving initial problems, creative formation of hypotheses, critical testing, revision, and discovery of new problems, not only serves as the model for subjective mind’s grasp of the world of objective mind; according to Popper, the third world is essentially made up of problems, theories, and arguments. He does also mention, in addition to theories and tools, social institutions and works of art as examples of entities in the third world…. Strictly speaking, the third world is the totality of Fregean Gedanken [thoughts], whether true or false, embodied or not” (p. 79, emphasis in original).

“Popper not only conceives of the third world in ontological terms as a totality of entities with a specific mode of being; within this framework he also understands it in a one-sided manner, from the conceptual perspective of the development of science” (ibid).

Otherwise said, Popper — like many of the moderns — still privileges efficient causality.

“Both aspects prove to be severe restrictions in the attempt to make Popper’s concept of the third world useful for the foundations of sociology. I.C. Jarvie starts from the phenomenological sociology of knowledge inspired by Alfred Schutz, which conceives of society as a social construction of the everyday world that issues from the interpretive processes of acting subjects and congeals into objectivity. But he analyzes the ontological status of the social life-context , which is produced by the human mind and yet preserves a relative independence from it, on the model of the third world” (ibid).

“[C]arrying Popper’s three-world theory over from epistemological to action-theoretic contexts makes the weaknesses of the construction visible” (p. 80).

“Jarvie neglects the elements of cultural tradition that cannot be reduced to Gedanken or propositions admitting of truth. He limits the objective complexes of meaning that acting subjects both produce and discover to cognitive interpretations in the narrow sense. In this respect Popper’s model of the third world is particularly implausible, for the action-orienting power of cultural values is at least as important for interactions as that of theories. Either the status of societal entities is assimilated to that of theories; or … it permits no distinction between cultural values and the institutional embodiment of values in norms” (p. 81).

Habermas criticizes both narrow cognitivism and its reduction of everything to efficient causes.

“To begin with, I would like to replace the ontological concept of ‘world’ with one derived from the phenomenological tradition and to adopt the pair of concepts ‘world’ and ‘lifeworld’…. [P]henomenologists like Alfred Schutz speak of the lifeworld as the unthematically given horizon within which participants in communication move in common when they refer thematically to something in the world” (p. 82).

“I would like to replace the one-sidedly cognitivistic interpretation of the concept ‘objective mind’ with a concept of cultural knowledge differentiated according to several validity claims…. From the perspective of action theory, the activities of the human mind are not easily limited to the cognitive-instrumental confrontation with external nature; social actions are oriented to cultural values and these do not have a truth relation” (p. 83).

Much of his first volume will be taken up with a reading of the neo-Kantian sociology of Max Weber. Habermas positions Weber’s stance as an alternative to Jarvie’s use of Popper.

“Weber understands cultural tradition in toto as a store of knowledge out of which special spheres of value and systems of knowledge are formed under different validity claims. He would thus include in the third world the evaluative and expressive components of culture as well as the cognitive-instrumental. If one adopts this alternative, one must of course explain what ‘validity’ and ‘knowledge’ can mean in regard to the noncognitive components of culture” (p. 84).

I am sympathetic to Brandom’s idea that evaluative and expressive aspects not only need to be included, but come first in the order of explanation.

“Participants in communication who are seeking to come to an understanding with one another about something do not take up a relation only to the one objective world, as is suggested by the precommunicative model dominant in empiricism. They by no means refer only to things that happen or could happen or could be made to happen in the objective world, but to things in the subjective and social worlds as well” (ibid).

With what he calls the communicative model, Habermas aims to conclusively move beyond egocentrism and physicalistic reductionism in the understanding of the human.

Worldview, Lifeworld

I had expected to skip further ahead, but Habermas’s second chapter is also of great interest. He is digging deeper into the concept of criticizable validity claims in ordinary social situations, and what conditions they presuppose. In a way he is reaching for something like what I used to imagine a sociology of knowledge could be, but he connects it with linguistic pragmatics, speech act theory, argumentation theory, and linguistic philosophy in general, in a way that is quite original.

“The concept of propositional truth is in fact too narrow to cover everything for which participants in argument claim validity in the logical sense. For this reason the theory of argumentation must be equipped with a more comprehensive concept of validity that is not restricted to validity in the sense of truth. But it does not at all follow from this that we have to renounce concepts of validity analogous to truth, to expunge every counterfactual moment from the concept of validity and to equate validity with context-dependent acceptability” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 30).

Habermas wants to allow neither absolutism nor relativism, as is entirely appropriate. (Everything interesting is in between.)

In the early 20th century, Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge had a similar goal. Mannheim’s work was also based on an analysis of processes of modernization, but got caught up in allegations of relativism. Habermas aims to do better on this score. And at least in general terms, due in large measure to his inclusion of considerations from linguistic philosophy, I think he succeeds.

“We try to support a claim with good grounds or reasons; the quality of the reasons and their relevance can be called into question by the other side; we meet objections and are in some cases forced to modify our original position” (ibid).

To me, this is an articulation of what could be considered the fundamental principle of Socratic, Platonic, or ethical dialogue. It is also fundamental to Brandom’s enterprise. (In the near future, I’ll add a post on Brandom’s interesting discussion of Habermas.)

“The rationality of worldviews is not measured in terms of logical and semantic properties but in terms of the formal-pragmatic basic concepts they place at the disposal of individuals for interpreting the world” (p. 45).

Here, like Brandom, he is arguing that pragmatics comes before semantics in the order of explanation. But Habermas also has a substantial engagement with sociological and cultural-anthropological theory. He has lengthy discussions of Max Weber, but also substantially addresses Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, and Talcott Parsons. I put the same caveats on “formal-pragmatic” as I did on “formal concepts” above.

“From Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss, anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out the peculiar confusion between nature and culture” (p. 48).

This observation has great relevance to ordinary life. One of the things that culture prominently does is to appear to be natural.

“Validity is confounded with empirical efficacy…. Concepts of validity such as morality and truth are amalgamated with empirical ordering concepts, such as causality and health. Thus a linguistically constituted worldview can be identified with the world-order itself to such an extent that it cannot be perceived as an interpretation of the world that is subject to error and open to criticism” (p. 50).

This is how “ideology” works.

“Validity claims are in principle open to criticism because they are based on formal world-concepts. They presuppose a world that is identical for all possible observers, or a world intersubjectively shared by members. Such claims call for the rational response of a partner in communication” (ibid).

Here we again have the programmatic ideal of open discussion that Habermas shares with Rorty and Brandom. It is not quite clear what Habermas means by “formal concepts”. I am not sure why he specifies that the concepts must be “formal”, and I think Brandom would definitely dispute that they should be called that. But I have the sense that when he says “formal”, Habermas may just mean “subject to the give and take of reasons”. Habermas does not seem to share Brandom’s emphasis on material inference, so he may think of reasoning in general as “formal”.

“By contrast, mythical worldviews prevent us from categorially uncoupling nature and culture, not only through conceptually mixing the objective and social worlds but also through reifying the linguistic worldview. As a result the concept of the world is dogmatically invested with a specific content that is withdrawn from rational discussion and thus from criticism” (p. 51).

Habermas offers a more specific analysis of how what Brandom calls “traditional” normativity emerges.

“But an analogous mixing of domains of reality can be shown as well for the relationship of culture and internal nature or the subjective world…. Only against the background of a normative reality that has become autonomous, and measured against the criticizable claim to normative rightness, can intentions, wishes, attitudes, feelings appear as illegitimate or merely idiosyncratic, as nongeneralizable and merely subjective. To the degree that mythical worldviews hold sway over cognition and orientations for action, a clear demarcation of a domain of subjectivity is apparently not possible. Intentions and motives are just as little separated from actions and their consequences as feelings are from their normatively fixed, stereotyped expressions” (ibid, emphasis in original).

I found this eye-opening. He seems to be suggesting that normative reality becomes autonomous (i.e., subject to critical discussion) as a result of the same complex historical processes of economic/technical/instrumental rationalization that we elsewhere decry for their alienating effects. This raises the stakes quite a bit.

I also appreciate the three-way distinction between subjective, objective, and intersubjective.

“Mythical worldviews are not understood by members as interpretive systems that are attached to cultural traditions, constituted by internal interrelations of meaning, symbolically related to reality, and connected with validity claims — and thus exposed to criticism and open to revision…. Of course, this does not yet prove that the supposed rationality expressed in our understanding of the world is more than a reflection of the particular features of a culture stamped by science, that it may rightfully raise a claim to universality” (pp. 52-53).

Habermas notes that discussions of modernity and rationality are often taken to involve a Eurocentric prejudice, and clearly wants to avoid this.

“Worldviews store the cultural knowledge with the help of which a language community interprets the world” (pp. 56-57).

With my Platonic scruples, I would not call this kind of acculturation “knowledge”. It seems closer to the notion of Aristotelian ethos.

“Inasmuch as worldviews refer to totalities, we cannot get behind them as articulations of an understanding of the world, even if they can be revised. In this respect they are like a portrait that claims to represent a person as a whole. A portrait is neither a mapping that can be exact or inexact, nor a rendering of facts in the sense of a proposition that can be true or false. A portrait offers rather an angle of vision from which the person represented appears in a certain way. Thus there can be numerous portraits of the same person; they can make the character appear in quite different aspects, and yet they can all be experienced as accurate, authentic, or adequate…. Worldviews can no more be true or false than can portraits” (p. 58).

“On the other hand, worldviews differ from portraits in that they in turn make possible utterances that admit of truth…. Owing to their reference to totality, worldviews are indeed removed from the dimension in which a judgment of them according to criteria of truth makes sense; even the choice of criteria according to which the truth of statements is to be judged may depend on the basic conceptual context of a worldview. But this does not mean that the idea of truth might itself be understood in a particularistic way. Whatever language system we choose, we always start intuitively from the presupposition that truth is a universal validity claim. If a statement is true, it merits universal assent, no matter in which language it is formulated. The adequacy of a linguistically articulated worldview is a function of the true statements that are possible in this language system” (pp. 58-59).

Here he articulates a moral ideal of universality. While we must constantly be wary of premature claims to universality, really effective universality just is the valid generalization of shared understanding. If shared understanding is a good thing, then more or deeper shared understanding is a better thing.

“Worldviews are comparable only in respect to their potency for conferring meaning…. They open equally primordial possibilities of ‘making sense of human life’. They thereby structure forms of life that are incommensurable in their value. The rationality of forms of life cannot be reduced to the cognitive adequacy of the worldviews underlying them” (p. 59, emphasis in original).

“However, worldviews are constitutive not only for processes of reaching understanding but for the social integration and socialization of individuals as well…. This identity-securing knowledge becomes more and more formal along the path from closed to open worldviews” (p. 64, emphasis in original).

Again, I would not call it knowledge, but the point still stands. The way he uses “formal” here, in explicit association with openness, influences my reading of “formal” in the other passages.

“In discussing Weber’s sociology of religion in the next chapter, I shall attempt to make the development of religious worldviews comprehensible from the aspect of a development of formal world-concepts, that is, as a learning process. In doing so I shall be making tacit use of a concept of learning that Piaget expounded for the ontogenesis of structures of consciousness” (p. 67).

This ambitious goal of treating historical development as a learning process applies as well to Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom. Habermas more specifically connects it to Piaget’s work in developmental cognitive psychology and the concept of open systems, both of which broadly speaking are empirical rather than philosophical. Here some balance is needed. If taken too far or in the wrong way, belief in progress can turn into an apologetic for the status quo.

“The growing child works out for himself, equiprimordially, the concepts of the external and internal worlds in dealing practically with objects and with himself. Piaget also draws a distinction between dealing with physical objects and dealing with social objects, that is, ‘reciprocal action between a subject and objects and reciprocal action between a subject and other subjects’ (p. 68).

“Thus for Piaget there is cognitive development in a wider sense, which is not understood solely as the construction of an external universe but also as the construction of a reference system for the simultaneous demarcation of the objective and social worlds from the subjective world. Cognitive development signifies in general the decentration of an egocentric understanding of the world” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

The goal of reaching understanding is far more important than being “right” in a dispute.

Habermas has been criticized for his “cognitivist” approach to ethics. I think cognitivism in this sense boils down to the position that what is good cannot be determined in complete abstraction from what is true. Brandom and Habermas also assert the converse: that what is true cannot be determined in complete abstraction from what is good. I don’t see anything narrow about this.

“Every action oriented to reaching understanding can be conceived as part of a cooperative process of interpretation aiming at situation definitions that are intersubjectively recognized” (pp. 69-70).

Here we have shared understanding as an overarching moral goal.

“I can introduce here the concept of the Lebenswelt or lifeworld, to begin with as the correlate of processes of reaching understanding…. In their interpretive accomplishments the members of a communication community demarcate the one objective world and their intersubjectively shared social world from the subjective worlds of individuals and (other) collectives. The world-concepts and the corresponding validity claims provide the formal scaffolding with which those acting communicatively order problematic contexts of situations, that is, those requiring agreement, in their lifeworld, which is presupposed as unproblematic” (p. 70).

“The lifeworld also stores the interpretive work of preceding generations. It is the conservative counterweight to the risk of disagreement that arises within every actual process of reaching understanding; for communicative actors can achieve an understanding only by way of taking yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims. The relation between these weights changes with the decentration of worldviews. The more the worldview that furnishes the cultural stock of knowledge is decentered, the less the need for understanding is covered in advance by an interpreted lifeworld immune from critique and the more this need has to be met by the interpretive accomplishments of the participants themselves…. The more cultural traditions predecide which validity claims, when, where, for what, from whom, and to whom must be accepted, the less the participants themselves have the possibility of making explicit and examining the potential grounds on which their yes/no positions are based” (pp. 70-71).

As he says, lifeworlds in general have a conservative aspect. They serve stability, not novelty. But more specifically, he is emphasizing that based on a more detailed view, lifeworlds can also be placed on a scale of relative openness or closedness.

Here he begins to discuss mythical worldviews. Mythical worldviews, he maintains, are inevitably closed in this sense. Conversely, this seems to be the way in which potentially alienating modern abstraction also at the same time grounds discursive openness. Modernization is then conceived as a progress along this axis, toward greater discursive openness.

“To the degree that the lifeworld of a social group is interpreted through a mythical worldview, the burden of interpretation is removed from the individual member, as well as the chance for him to bring about an agreement open to criticism. To the extent that the worldview remains sociocentric in Piaget’s sense, it does not permit differentiation between the world of existing states of affairs, valid norms and expressible subjective experiences. The linguistic worldview is reified as the world order and cannot be seen as an interpretive system open to criticism” (p. 71).

Our lifeworld comprises everything that we take to be what Sellars and Brandom call “Given” (as in “the Myth of”). Like “consciousness”, lifeworld is another more specific name for appearance. Decentered understanding works by partially negating or qualifying the givenness of the “Given”.

“If we employ Piaget’s concept of decentration as a guiding thread in this way, in order to clarify the internal connection between the structure of a worldview, the lifeworld as the context of processes of understanding, and the possibilities of a rational conduct of life, we again encounter the concept of communicative rationality. This concept relates a decentered understanding of the world to the possibility of discursively redeeming criticizable validity claims” (p. 72).

Habermas’s communicative reason, it seems to me, is an interpretive paradigm of what I would call ethical inquiry, completely independent of the instrumental reason associated with efficient causes and efficient means of doing things.

I am pleased to see the use he repeatedly makes of the notion of “decentering”.

“Perhaps we should talk instead of a balance among non-self-sufficient moments, an equilibrated interplay of the cognitive with the moral and the aesthetic-practical. But the attempt to provide an equivalent for what was once intended by the good life should not mislead us into deriving this idea from the formal concept of reason with which modernity’s decentered understanding of the world has left us” (p. 73).

This is a little ambiguous. I suspect he means both that we can no longer define the good life at all, and also more specifically that the good life cannot be derived from formal reason. I agree with the second, but I think it is still meaningful to talk about the good life, and that it has an important relation to informal practices of reason.

“A critique of this sort can indeed be based on the procedural concept of communicative rationality if it can be shown that the decentration of world understanding and the rationalization of the lifeworld are necessary conditions for an emancipated society” (p. 74).

I provisionally believe this is indeed what he aims to show.

Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).

Ethics of Communication

The work of Jürgen Habermas, whom I recently cited, has both significant points of commonality and significant points of contrast with that of Robert Brandom, who first opened my eyes to a sympathetic reading of Kant and Hegel. I’d like to explore how both of these can be related to the broad aims of Platonic dialogue. Eventually, I also hope to relate this all to the needs and circumstances of emotionally sensitive personal communication between individuals.

Most human sayings of things have ethical significance. Many if not most human conflicts are traceable to communication issues. Habermas is mainly interested in exploring this at a broad social and political level. At this point in my life, I mainly hope to have some positive impact on the micro level of personal relationships. But in the world, there are close connections between these, and it would be artificial to try to completely separate them.

Habermas combines a broadly Kantian, procedural and “cognitivist”, rules- and rights-oriented concept of morality with a post-Kantian concern for intersubjectivity. He combines serious attention to German and American sociology, law, and political science, with a sympathy for both American pragmatism and the social criticism of the Young Hegelians and the Frankfurt school. He has a rather old-school, negative view of Hegel, but defends the relevance and usefulness of the broader tradition of German idealism, construed in a way that is compatible with modern science.

Brandom explicitly credits Habermas as an early influence, but also finds great value and contemporary relevance in Hegel. Brandom and Habermas have each written some about the other. Like Brandom, Habermas is a strong defender of modernity, and of the core Enlightenment values of democratic freedom and equality.

Often cited as Habermas’s magnum opus is the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German ed. 1981; English tr. 1984, 1987). Like Brandom, he regards the pragmatics (simply put, the use) of language as coming before semantics or the study of meaning. Habermas directly associates the pragmatics of language with justification and the giving of reasons.

Habermas and Brandom both connect linguistic pragmatics with American pragmatist philosophy, by recognizing that saying is a kind of doing. They both see meaning in terms of dialogue about reasons, which I think should also be strongly associated with Platonic dialogue.

The theory of communicative action is intended mainly as an explanatory theory dealing with questions of publicly addressable fact. It deliberately straddles the boundary between philosophy and social science.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas talks about a formal pragmatics, and a non-standard formal semantics (inspired by Michael Dummet’s argument that verification comes before truth, which also has affinities with constructive logic). Brandom applies a kind of Hegelian dislike of formalism in developing an account of material inference.

Habermas is also the leading promoter of what he calls discourse ethics, about which I’ll have more to say in upcoming posts. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (German ed. 1983, English tr. 1990) and Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (German ed. 1991, English tr. 1993) develop his more specific views on ethics and morality. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (German ed.1992, English tr. 1996) applies closely related principles at the level of politics and law. These are large and sophisticated developments, with many nuances that are not very amenable to haiku-like summary, but nonetheless, over the course of a few posts, I hope to capture an overview.

I see Platonic dialogue as a kind of ideal model for what Habermas calls communication, corresponding to what Hegel, Brandom, and Habermas all call mutual recognition. At the same time, the various prerequisites for good dialogue are constitutive for meta-level judgment about our practices of communication in life. This applies as much to overcoming misunderstandings between individuals in personal life, as it does to law and politics.

Habermas on Heidegger

I don’t usually like to dwell on the negative, but Heidegger has aggressively demeaned Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Western philosophy as a whole, and I just stumbled on this. In the 2023 English translation of the first part of his Also a History of Philosophy (German ed. 2019), leading German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has some very sharp remarks.

Habermas was only four years old when Hitler took power in 1933. Like many children, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he “was shaken to his core by what he learnt of the Nazi atrocities from the Nuremberg Trials, and news coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, although still in his teens, he experienced 1945 as a turning point that would shape his political and cultural outlook”. In 1953, Habermas was again extremely disturbed when Heidegger published his 1934 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures, without removing a reference to “the inner greatness” of national socialism.

Speaking about Heidegger’s student the philosopher Karl Löwith, who was Jewish and was forced to emigrate, Habermas says “Löwith wants to strip away everything forced and solemnly exalted from the necessary return to the ancient understanding of nature, that gesture of elitist self-dramatization he had come to detest above all in the teaching and comportment, in the character and attitude, of his teacher Martin Heidegger” (p. 26). Elsewhere I read that Löwith himself recounts that when he met Heidegger in Switzerland during the war, Heidegger was wearing his swastika pin. This colors Heidegger’s claim that he had no more identification with the Nazis after 1934.

“[W]ith his concept of the ‘history of being’, Heidegger radicalized [philosophy of history] into a dubious second-level historicism…. Underlying this problematic figure of thought is the infallible claim to truth that Heidegger himself raises for the assertion of a metahistorical ‘occurrence of truth’, which in turn outstrips the already excessively strong claims to truth of the major systems of Western metaphysics” (p. 28).

“Being and Time could still have been situated in the context of those major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movements, which, since the Young Hegelians, contributed to a detranscendentalization of the world-projecting spontaneity of Kantian subjectivity” (ibid). “But in fact Heidegger’s pretension overshoots all attempts to merely desublimate the transcendental world-projecting subjectivity of the human mind into a spontaneous mode of life in the world” (pp. 28-29).

“Heidegger is indeed a master when it comes to explicating the habitual performative knowledge that enables us to engage in the everyday practices of dealing with whatever we encounter in the world. These convincing analyses of a broad spectrum of lifeworld references of human ‘Dasein’ are, however, deflected onto a different path when Heidegger short-circuits the examination of human beings’ mode of existence with the ontological intention of grasping the being of beings as such…. But since the question of being is internally connected with the question of truth, the ontological redirection of the analytic of Dasein to the question of the being of beings leads to a far-reaching prejudicing of the understanding of truth — namely, the confusion of truth with world disclosure” (p. 29).

This “world disclosure” is a comprehensive name for all immediate experience of appearance, or immediate consciousness. While at some level appearance does deserve a kind of embrace as a necessary condition of life, a resolve to treat immediate appearance as having the final character of an unquestionable revelation makes dialogue impossible.

“By transforming the performatively known ‘how’ of standing in the horizon of our lifeworld into an explicit ‘knowledge’ of ‘what’, Heidegger brings a network of categories and attitudes (the so-called existentials) to consciousness that enables us to see the world and occurrences in it from a certain perspective, to experience it in certain emotional states and to address it under certain aspects. It is the ontological radicalization of this topic of linguistic world disclosure (as he would put it following Humboldt) into the metaphysical question of being and truth that misleads Heidegger into assimilating ‘truth’ to ‘world disclosure’. Heidegger de-differentiates the clearly defined concept of propositional truth by assimilating it to the concept of ‘revealing’ world disclosure” (pp. 29-30).

As a young person, I was seduced by 1960s talk about immediacy and spontaneity, and for a while even took up the idea that what the world needed was a kind of renunciation of the non-immediate.

“The mistake, already implicit in Being and Time, of confusing the truth of propositions with a world disclosure that is ontologized and therefore immune to objections, is what lends the concept of the history of being its force” (p. 30). “In this way, the a priori of ‘world disclosure’ swallows up the critical potential of the ‘claim to truth’, because the power of the capacity to say ‘no’ can no longer extend to the basic conceptual structure in which being interprets itself. The crisis-proneness of the history of being is explained by the dialectical character of this self-interpretation of being: it simultaneously reveals and conceals itself in its epochal destinies. By withholding itself from apprehension, it makes itself felt by human beings as the calamity of God’s ‘absence’ or — in the Hölderlinesque neo-pagan jargon of the zeitgeist — of the gods” (ibid).

It is this immunity to objections that I object to as extremely dangerous.

“With the concept of the history of being, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy in a way that retains from the concept of ideology the moment of historically imposed illusion, but at the same time excludes the possibility of illumination through reflection” (ibid).

The exclusion of reflection and questioning that follows from a fixation on immediacy is the real disaster. All the higher achievements of spirit depend on reflection and mediation. Heidegger claims to expose the dogmatism of all other philosophy, and makes a lot of noise about it. This deflects our attention from the fact that giving strong normative status to immediacy effectively rules out any alternative to dogmatism. There is bad faith in these accusations, and if we try to resist, bad faith will be unfairly projected onto to us, which is the most insidious aspect of all this.

“Heidegger blames science and technology for the crisis from which supposedly only a return to the origins of Greek mythology — reaching back behind even the axial threshold of the Platonic logos and the God of the Old Testament — can rescue us. His fixation on the question of being leads him to focus on the deficiencies of theoretical and not — as in Schmitt and Strauss — of practical reason. Ultimately, the fateful alienation from the origin is implicit in reason itself” (pp. 30-31).

This discussion of Heidegger is part of a larger critique by Habermas of 20th-century claims by conservative authors like Schmitt and Strauss that central Enlightenment values like reason, freedom, and equal rights inevitably lead modernity into moral crisis.

“Even simple predicative statements, with which the discursive unfolding of possible cognitions as such begins, already involve an objectivistic ‘distortion’ of the pre-predicative, purely performative ‘know-how’. This deficiency inherent in the operations of reason is supposed to be the result of an act of objectivization that suppresses all connections and holistic references with which we are acquainted only in performance — and fatefully ‘forgets’ them” (p. 31).

There is a huge difference between recognizing that simple predications can be taken in a dogmatic way, and claiming that they inevitably, intrinsically lead to crisis and disaster.

As Habermas writes with obvious irony, “Against this background of a devaluation of the ‘normal’ concept of reason, philosophers are promoted into thinkers and, together with the poets, are sworn to a nondiscursive ‘apprehension of being'” (ibid).

Henceforth, according to Heidegger, philosophy should concern itself exclusively with putative poetic revelation, and reject everything that is not such a revelation. Opposite to this, I think both poetry and religion fare better when what is called revelation is understood as a kind of poetic expression that may be intensely meaningful for us, but does not serve to exclude anything.

What gives standard assertion its weight or “bite” is the fact that it has meaning by virtue of distinguishing from what would contradict it. But one poetic expression does not contradict another. Treating poetic expression as a “revelation” of truth rather than as figurative undoes its character as poetic expression. Claims of revelation introduce a literalism or incipient fundamentalism that is the opposite of a poetic spirit.

Habermasian Recognition

I have not engaged a lot with the work of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), but he is well known for promoting a version of mutual recognition.

At a very preliminary level, it seems he relies more on a presumption of abstract equality between participants, where Brandom incorporates consideration of their actual performance (see Scorekeeping). Habermas has also tended to assume that full consensus is the only desirable outcome, whereas Brandom takes a more positive view of clarifications that do not lead to consensus.

Habermas is a prolific writer, so I may be missing something mitigating, but both these differences seem to me to make the Žižekian criticisms of mutual recognition more applicable to the Habermasian version than to the Brandomian one.